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How X-Ray Scanners Became Mandatory In US Airports

Posted by Soulskill on from the slowly-but-surly dept.

OverTheGeicoE writes "ProPublica has a story on how x-ray scanners became the controversial yet mandatory security fixtures we in the US must now endure. The story title, 'U.S. Government Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners,' summarizes a substantial part of the article, but not all of it. The story also describes how government attitudes about the scanners went from overwhelmingly negative in the early 1990s to the naive optimism we see today. How did this change occur? The government weakened its regulatory structure for radiation safety in electronic devices, and left defining safety standards to an ANSI committee dominated by scanner producers and users (prison and customs officials). Even after 9/11 there was still great mistrust of x-ray scanners, but nine years of lobbying from scanner manufacturers, panic over failed terrorist attacks, and pressure from legislators advancing businesses in their own districts eventually forced the devices into the airports. The article estimates that 6 to 100 cancers per year will be caused by the x-ray scanners."

34 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. It was a lobby, and some panic... what a surprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The reason why there are scanners: not because there is an actual need, or statistics that say so, or science or anything objective.

    It was a result of panic and greed.

    Just like the rest of that War on Terror.

  2. That's a good tradeoff by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, 100 people a year could get a death sentence from a system that has yet to save a single life? That makes as much sense as anything else this government does.

    1. Re:That's a good tradeoff by heypete · · Score: 4, Informative

      X-rays are ionizing radiation.

    2. Re:That's a good tradeoff by peragrin · · Score: 3, Informative

      X-rays arent good for you but mostly is the weak shieleding and poor maintience that is the long term problem. Those 100 people will be the security guards standing by the machines for 40 hours a week for 5 years.

      Every 5 minutes or so they are getting a full xray dose.

      --
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    3. Re:That's a good tradeoff by mbone · · Score: 5, Informative

      There has been a long debate on this, most of which you can easily find by search engine. These devices do a raster scan with a fairly intense spot beam (most of this radiation goes right through you; the spot beam has to be strong as the signal is actually the fraction scattered off of your skin). The spot beam would be a problem if it was to sit on one location for any length of time, so you are totally reliant on the software to not get a serious dose. That alone is a real worry, as most medical Xray radiation problems are due to software errors. That also means that any repeated glints out of the device (say, by people's metal buttons) are likely to cause problems for nearby agents (as they tend to stand in the same place, and so could get repeated exposures). It also means that just wearing a dosimeter is pretty worthless. The agent's chest might get no glint exposure and their feet or crotch might get a serious one.

      The above is pretty much the conventional wisdom. As a physicist, I also worry about the way that they calculated dosage (whole body versus surface exposure) may seriously underestimate the risk, but that worry is not very conventional. If I am right, look for skin cancers to start appearing in frequent flyers in areas normally covered by clothing. Of course, that will take a few years; Michael Chertoff is likely to have retired with his loot by then.

    4. Re:That's a good tradeoff by mr1911 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Do the scanners really pose a health threat?

      It is quite certain they are not good for you.

      Scanning tools at the hospital have to pass high hurdles to be certified for use. The scanners at the airport were installed such that they circumvented such certification. Do you think it would have been necessary to circumvent the certification if they would have passed?

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    5. Re:That's a good tradeoff by ChumpusRex2003 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Nice post. Just one correction, at the beam energies used in these devices (50 kVp - 120 kVp), most X-ray photons certainly do not go straight through you. At about 120 kVp, about 75% will get absorbed through the torso - and in the case of 50 kVp, essentially 100% will be absorbed (with only a fraction of a percent getting scattered, as 50 kVp is below the optimal range for Compton scattering in body tissues).

      In fact, it was widely stated in the marketing information and propaganda for these scanners that the X-ray beam does not penetrate skin. This statement is patently false at all energies in commercial use. If they can get away with deliberate lies as basic as that, how can you reasonably believe any more difficult claims?

    6. Re:That's a good tradeoff by Matt.Battey · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They are also required to be enclosed in lead lined rooms, with leaded glass, and use lead lined doors and door frames. This is to protect the radiologic technologist, the radiologist, and patients in surrounding corridors and rooms. When anyone must be present in a room when the HE photon gun is activated, they are required to wear full body leaded gowns, and neck collars to protect the thyroid. Patients are also provided shields to cover the torso or thyroid when that region is not being scanned. This is particularly important for women, as female zygotes 100% present from birth, unlike male zygotes which are fully regenerated about every 15 days. Hospital workers are required to be licensed by the state health board in order to operate the machinery, as it is up to the operator to ensure that overexposure does not occur. Many boards require yearly continuing education to maintain the license as well.

      In the airport the machines are in open air rooms, with the majority of the TSA staff standing with in 10 meters of the system. There is no shielding for the TSA employees or other airport workers near by. Compare that to the baggage scanner that is completely enclosed in lead, and has leaded curtains at both the entry and exit of the machine. I'm fairly certain that none of the TSA FBS operators are licensed by state health boards.

  3. Broken window fallacy by Compaqt · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...pressure from legislators advancing businesses in their own districts eventually forced the devices into the airports.

    The idea is that you create "make-work" for people to do, and then there'll be more jobs.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

    The problem is the money you're spending is coming out of taxes, which is reducing the amount that would have been invested in other productivity-enhancing or job-producing activities in the economy.

    --
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    1. Re:Broken window fallacy by grumling · · Score: 5, Informative

      Like the Hoover Dam was pretty much busy work to get the economy going again (jobs, money flow, pride, etc) and when it was complete it became a large source of electricity.

      Bad example. The Hoover Dam was planned and sent through Congress during the Harding and Coolidge administrations. It was a happy accident that it was built during the 1930s, and Six Companies made out like bandits because they got labor at a much better price than estimated, and lots of it. In fact, the reason it is called the Hoover Dam and not Boulder Dam is because Hoover got the states together to sign the Colorado River Pact in the late teens and early 1920s. And the benefit to the US (and the world) is easily calculated in irrigated land in the southern US and the massive increase in food production that resulted.

      A make work project would be about 1/2 the various epidemiological studies that look at cancer rates and power lines. Or locking up drug offenders for life.

      --
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    2. Re:Broken window fallacy by anwaya · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Hoover dam does more than just make electricity: it is part of the system of dams that control the Colorado's propensity to flood uncontrollably, and this control allows a stable agricultural system to flourish, which feeds tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people. You know, rather than the fields being wiped out every ten years, or permanently flooded like the Salton Sea.

      Lake Mead is named for the genius from the Bureau of Land Management who made this happen. He was from the government, and he was there to help.

  4. I for one... by taiwanjohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    do not welcome our new x-ray overlords.

    --
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  5. The TL;DR version. by crow_t_robot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "How X-Ray Scanners Became Mandatory In US Airports" --> Raw, unmitigated fear.

    1. Re:The TL;DR version. by dkleinsc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, that's not correct: It was raw, unmitigated corruption.

      Or did you think it was an accident that then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, in charge of DHS when they made the decision to use the scanners, just happened to have a financial interest in the company that makes the scanners?

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  6. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Informative

    Eat a Ham Sandwich, Drink a beer.

    I'v travelled in several muslim countries (Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Turkey) and saw people in each of those countries drinking alcohol. I also questioned a muslim colleague about things like this, and his off-handed remark was that he would "pay for it in the next life".
     
    When it comes down to it, the average people are the same all over the world - they'll pay lip service to appear to be doing what the are supposed to do, but if no one notices, then they'll just do what they want to do.

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  7. Re:Airport security is a farce by ledow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even better:

    I was once in an airport queue with an American friend who had, somehow, managed to bring a can of CS spray into a country where any sort of offensive weapon is illegal. CS spray is illegal for anything but police use over here. You will be arrested just for having it on you, whether you use it or not, whether it's for "self-defence" or not. It's just an instantaneous "arrest me".

    They'd managed to bring it from the US, through all the "heightened" airport security post-9-11, onto a plane, into my country, through my airport security, carry it around London for several weeks in her handbag (including through museum entry security checks, public transport etc), and only because her friends spotted it when she opened her bag IN A LONDON AIRPORT as she headed home - specifically, the queue to security scanning - that anyone knew she'd had it.

    In London, carrying CS spray is an instant arrest that would pretty much provoke an immediate armed response anyway, especially in an airport which is about the only place the average Brit would ever see live weapons in real-life (carried by the policemen).

    We quietly and hastily had her dispose of it into the wheelie-bins used for over-size deodorants etc. (as you say, they're just a large, unchecked "trash can" full of material that you're NOT allowed to take on a plane because of it's contents or size, sitting in the middle of an airport foyer) and passed through the airport unhindered onto our destination.

    God knows what happens in that bin. The incineration must be fabulous when they do it, because it could literally contain anything at all. And, as you point out, prime target to drop a couple of things in, along with a dozen or a thousand "innocent" items that your accomplices can put in there earlier in the day and be pretty much untraceable which one caused the explosion. Right by the entrance to a security queue which can take hours to pass through and contain thousands of passengers sounds pretty much perfect - and the risk is just that of dropping someone off at an airport and them dropping something in a bin designed for things to be dropped into anonymously, because those bins are not "airside".

  8. 6 to 100 cancers per year will be caused... by fredrated · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In other words, more people will die from exposure to the scanners than would have died from the supposed terrorist attacks they 'protect' us from. And why? Money of course, that is what runs this country (into the ground).

    1. Re:6 to 100 cancers per year will be caused... by TheNastyInThePasty · · Score: 3, Insightful
      No.

      The US is not filled with terrorists at every corner, just waiting for us to relax airport security so they have a chance to blow up as many Americans as possible. You've fallen into the fear.

      Ignoring the fact that there are still ways to get a bomb past security despite these scanners, here's a list of places where you could kill more people, with less security, by blowing up a bomb there instead of on a plane:

      Pro Sports Event
      Mall
      Large classroom auditorium
      Popular (i.e. rivalry) High School Sports Event
      Concerts
      Conventions
      etc...

      Why have there been no terrorist attacks in these places? Oh yeah, because the number of terrorists in America willing and able to blow themselves up in one of these locations is so incredibly small that we are actively killing more Americans using this technology than they could ever hope to achieve.

      --
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    2. Re:6 to 100 cancers per year will be caused... by kilfarsnar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sure, but if we didn't have scanners and it was fairly trivial to get through security, they number would skyrocket.

      That's your fear talking. These scanners have only been in place a few years. It's not like there were frequent attacks before that. So what are they preventing? All of this hysteria is caused by our reaction to a singular event over a decade ago; an event these scanners would not have prevented.

      --
      "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
    3. Re:6 to 100 cancers per year will be caused... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure, but if we didn't have scanners and it was fairly trivial to get through security, the number would skyrocket.

      That's provably false.

      No terrorist sees the security at airports and says, "Oh well, I'll just give up, go home and play xbox."
      Instead he looks for another target that is less well defended and hits that instead.

      So why haven't the number of attacks on other targets - like movie theaters and shopping malls or even just sabotage on unguarded train tracks - skyrocketed? The number of such attacks in the last decade is so small that you can count them on one hand with fingers to spare.

      --
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  9. Re:Point gun at foot. SHOOT! by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ok. 100 people a year. 10 years. I sincerely doubt the "terrorists" could kill 1000 people in 10 years on US soil.

    ...Except when they killed almost 3000 in one day...

    Yep .. they sure did kill 3000 in one day. However the preventative measures to stop them doing this again seems to be killing more that 300 people a year through increased road traffic (and hence car crashes) and (as reported in this article - although this is not news) another 100 or so a year from cancer.
     
    Terrorism is not something you can eradicate (especially if your foreign policy is to continually piss people off), so combatting it is always going to be a trade off/balance between how much hurt you can accept from the terrorists vs how much hurt you will inflict on your own people in the name of "protecting" them.
     
    In this case I find it strange that the solution to stopping the terrorists from killing off US citizens is to institute policies that effectively cause the US government to kill off even more citizens than the terrorists have.

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  10. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Funny

    That's why El-Al asks if you if you have any sort of stuff carried on anyone else's behalf, and if you do, they check all your stuff.

    Whenever I get asked the question "Has your luggage been out of your sight for any length of time or handled by other people" I really have to bite my tongue to stop saying "Yes .. the taxi driver loaded/unloaded my luggage and I haven't seen it for the last hour or so" .. That would be the honest answer, but unfortunately that would be the wrong way to answer.

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  11. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by AlecC · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I was told by a Muslim that the actual ruling in the Koran is that you should not "allow alcohol to rule you". His interpretation was that he should not get drunk, and was quite happy to drink a single beer.

    --
    Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
  12. Re:Airport security is a farce by bondsbw · · Score: 3, Insightful

    why bother bringing the plane down when there are large lines of people waiting in line to go through the security checkpoint that are all vulnerable to attack

    Because terrorists want western society to become a police state, or dictatorship, or whatever isn't free. Their goal is to incite fear of freedom, and to make society beg their government to make them less free (in exchange, of course, for something like security).

    --
    All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  13. Not as bad as other statistics. by Kludge · · Score: 3

    The point is that these numbers are better than the numbers that justify the existence of the scanners. What cost/risk/benefit analysis has been done to demonstrate that these scanners are useful? The answer is none.

    So, will this cause more cancer, yes.

    So will these scanners save any lives? No.
    End of analysis.

  14. Re:Opting out by bberens · · Score: 3, Informative

    At the end of the day though; someone touching my crotch very briefly (trust me, they don't want to be touching me any more than I want to be touched) isn't going to give me cancer.

    No it wont' give you cancer, but it should be considered an unreasonable search under the Constitution.

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  15. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by mr1911 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You are still not safe.

    You do understand that since the TSA is searching for the rogue bottle of water or shampoo that is 3.1 oz instead of 3 oz they are letting guns, knives, and who knows what else through the checkpoints. You do understand there are multiple paths to get nefarious things on an airplane. You do realize that the passengers on the plane no longer believe that compliance is the proper response and will deal with threats onboard such as the shoe and underwear bombers.

    The TSA ensuring your "safety" is an illusion. If you believe it, then good for you - Santa still comes down the chimney and eats the cookies you left out. The TSA is security theater -- it looks like they are busy doing useful things, but in the end it is all an act.

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  16. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Funny

    Those who are afraid to smoke crack are effectively ruled by crack.

    Those who are afraid to shove a red hot poker up there arses are effectively ruled by red hot pokers up their arses

  17. Re:Millimeter-wave scanners Re:That's a good trade by djmurdoch · · Score: 3, Informative

    According to TFA, about half of the ones that scan people are millimeter-wave, and half are x-ray.

  18. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Whenever I get asked the question "Has your luggage been out of your sight for any length of time or handled by other people" I really have to bite my tongue to stop saying "Yes .. the taxi driver loaded/unloaded my luggage and I haven't seen it for the last hour or so" .. That would be the honest answer, but unfortunately that would be the wrong way to answer.

    Check out this story It's about dwarves being put in suitcases and smuggled into coach holds to steal from other passengers cases during the journey.

    What's to stop one putting a little something extra in one of the cases?

    My luggage doesn't leave my sight until it's checked in. Ever.

    --
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  19. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by MozeeToby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Try taking a classified military radio (in a properly marked courier bag with all the paperwork) through security. Between what the xray of the bag showed, his truthful answer to "did you pack this bag yourself" and his response to requests to open the bag (he correctly said that he couldn't do that nor allow it to happen) he spent the night with airport security and only got out when someone from the base personally came to get him and told the TSA that he had done everything correctly.

  20. Re:I wish they would do the obvious by SlippyToad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    About four years ago I went on a business trip. My then-wife had given me a small medallion with a chinese symbol on it. I could SEE when the cunt checked me in at the counter she noticed this medallion with a "funny foreign symbol on it" and lo and behold I was selected for a pat-down at security.

    And as far as I know the cargo area of my plane was wide open to whoever the fuck wanted to get in there. That's my beef. This security theater shit is old. I did not have to take off my shoes in China or South Korea when boarding a plane (something I did 7 times in 10 days on a trip just a couple years back). It's all a sham.

    We've been talked out of our privacy, our rights, and our dignity and now the elite of the world giggle and profit as we are made to parade naked in front of them like fucking zoo animals. Fuck them in the ear.

    --
    One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
  21. Re:Point gun at foot. SHOOT! by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ok. 100 people a year. 10 years. I sincerely doubt the "terrorists" could kill 1000 people in 10 years on US soil.

    ...Except when they killed almost 3000 in one day...

    So what?

    And before you say I'm being flip or callous, remember this: more than that die every month from lack of medical care. Or this: more than 3000 died on 9/11 from cancer and heart/lung disease. There's no national day of mourning for the 9/11 victims of disease. Or the 9/10 victims. Or the 9/12 victims. And so on.

    The only thing that makes the 3000 terror victims special was that they were concentrated in just a few places where large scale acts of vandalism took place. The others had the common decency not to bother the general population by passing away in houses, hospitals, nursing homes and on the street.

    Go ahead, take a look at the National Vital Health Statistics and see what kills Americans. Pick any number you can imagine dying every year from terrorism and see what trivial thing beats it. 3000 a year? Peptic ulcers. 5000? Anemia. 20,000? Parkinson's. 45,000? Motor vehicle accidents. 75,000? Alzheimer's.

    So in the 11 years since 9/11, including 2001, what's the average deaths by terrorism? Under 300, right? (And that's low because of my terror-repellent rock). That's about the same number as deaths among Eskimo and Native American women in "transport accidents."

    My point? We're spending way too much time, causing way to much inconvenience, sacrificing too many liberties, and frankly being way to scared of one thing, when there are far better ways to spend our time, money, national soul, and global reputation on. We've ruined the country all in the cause of innumeracy.

    --
    I am not a crackpot.
  22. Re:Airport security is a farce by 1u3hr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because terrorists want western society to become a police state, or dictatorship, or whatever isn't free. Their goal is to incite fear of freedom,

    Bullshit. Al-qaeda et al, don't care what kind of government you have at home. You're all infidels, you're going to hell regardless. They want to influence your policy in the Middle East. Either simply to make you butt out and let them install fundamentalist governments; or to provoke you into such violent overreactions that you are thrown out by your former allies. That's what they want, they don't give a fuck about you and your civil rights either way. Just getting your army out of their way is their aim.

    Sure, after that they'd like to convert the whole world to Islam, by the sword if necessary, but that's for the next generation.